Faraday Future's 2.4-Second 0-60 Is Nothing But a Distraction

Last night, ambitious automotive startup Faraday Future finally debuted its first production-ready, semi-autonomous car. In a 90-minute presentation marred by multiple technical hiccups, Faraday Future presented its vision of a revolutionary new world of transportation—one where your car parks and sometimes drives itself, freeing you to be the pampered passenger in your own self-chauffeured luxury electric crossover.

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We didn't learn a whole lot about Faraday Future's first production offering, the FF 91, last night. Charging infrastructure? Unclear. Dealership arrangements? Never brought up. Shape and layout of the dashboard? Left to the imagination. Price? Your guess is as good as anyone's.

But amid all this vagueness, Faraday Future spent more than 20 percent of its stage time discussing acceleration. And for good reason: With a claimed 0-60 time of just 2.39 seconds, the FF 91 lays unverified claim to the title of world's quickest production car, narrowly edging out the most recent acceleration king, the Tesla Model S P100D.

And I'm left wondering why.

From the start, Faraday Future has aimed not just to enter the auto industry, but to alter it entirely. Consider our interview with Nick Sampson, head of R&D and engineering, last year: Sampson revealed that the nascent automaker doesn't plan to make its biggest profits from traditional car sales at all. Rather, Faraday Future sees itself as a content provider. When the vehicle pilots itself, you're free to consume media on every ride—media that's beamed and billed by Faraday Future. You may not even have to buy the car, simply hailing a roving autonomous vehicle when you need a ride.

So this focus on supreme acceleration seems a bit out of place. Faraday Future presents the FF 91 as an opportunity to free yourself from the drudgery of driving—a place to connect (via dual redundant onboard WiFi connections) to your emails or streaming TV shows, or to disconnect, darkening the windows and reclining your rear seat to an unprecedented 60 degrees.

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This hardly seem like the environment for a sub-three-second 0-60 blast.

Faraday Future's concept of transportation puts the automobile more in line with today's luxury private aircraft: A vehicle whose intended customer will never be asked to take the controls. Get in, buckle up, and use your travel time to work or unwind, the vision goes. When the whole experience is engineered to remove the driver from the piloting, performance numbers become irrelevant. The FF 91, with dimensions to rival a Ford Expedition, clearly wasn't designed for exhilarating cornering or supercar-baiting top speeds; endowing it with streetbike acceleration seems like a distraction from the mission statement.

It's clear that Faraday Future wants to shift the paradigm of the auto industry. Every employee who spoke onstage last night alluded to this goal—referring to the FF 91 as "a new species," gloating about how the company was leaving the old, entrenched habits of the legacy carmakers far behind. The car world's insistence on ever-faster, ever-more powerful appliance vehicles is perhaps its most entrenched, least logical holdover. It's not breeding excitement: A well-equipped Toyota Camry will outrun the hairiest muscle cars of the 1960s, and yet the average commuter doesn't show up at the office wide-eyed and frenzied with thrust-lust.

So I think Faraday Future would be wise to abandon the Ferrari and Tesla drag races and focus on actually building a vehicle. The company's autonomous electric car goals are laudable and lofty on their own; adding drag-racing bragging rights to this mix is like trying to balance another cherry on a sundae. Sure, a little muscle-flexing excess makes things fun, but let's save the theatrics for after the ice cream's been served.

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